About 30 m below ground or something rediculous lies the Chimeran Node Interior. I struggled with this. I won't lie. Chimeran architecture is an artform all it's own! At this point during my career I was hell bent on "characterizing" my environments. I say that because we're often in a hurry to create our environments and get them polished up. It's the nature of the beast. We ship a game a year and we pride ourselves on that! With the Node interior I attempted an experiment to make the entire level modular. In my opinion it was largely a success! But it came with many growing pains for me as an artist. I knew I had to make it modular if I wanted to characterize my pieces meaning I would take a little extra time on each piece and make it really special. This of course would not allow the time for a lot of pieces to be made so I worked with my designer to sort of balloon straw the level into manageable pieces. Balloonstrawing a level means that we break up the work load by creating high quality rooms seperated by modular corridors or whatever. Though this seams like it would be wholely linear gameplay it's actually quite easy to provide choice or the illusion of it with modular systems. Many of the columns were done with nice high to low models and the floors were a combination of that and zbrush. I've fully integrated zbrush into my environment pipeline as of the day of this writing and it all started by characterizing my environment. Some people knock modular systems and it's really a matter of preference. I can't say it's the optimal solution for every situation. But the Node was a very special place with very special circumstances and limitations. In the end the art turned out great and the experiment was worth the growing pains.
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